Julie Robinson Belafonte, a dancer, actress and, together with singer Harry Belafonte, one half of an interracial power couple who used their high position to support the civil rights and integration movement in the United States, died on March 9 in Los Angeles. She was 95 years old.
Her death at a Studio City assisted living facility was announced by her family. She had been living there for the past yr and a half after living in Manhattan for many years.
Mrs. Belafonte, a white woman and the second wife of Mr. Belafonte, a black Caribbean-American artist and activist, had an eclectic artistic profession. At various times she was a dancer, choreographer, dance teacher, actress and documentary producer.
Mrs. Belafonte traveled the country and the world together with her husband and children on Mr. Belafonte’s sold-out concert tours in the late Nineteen Fifties and early Sixties, presenting a picture of the close interracial family that was otherwise rarely seen on television and in newspapers and magazines.
She was at Mr. Belafonte’s side as they planned and hosted fundraisers for civil rights groups, including the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. and the more militant Student Peace Coordinating Committee.
Mr. Belafonte died last April at the age of 96, and at a memorial service held March 1 at Riverside Church in Manhattan, Ms. Belafonte’s efforts were remembered by their son, David Belafonte. “She marched and endured years of racial hatred and harassment,” he told the crowd, “when a high-profile relationship between a black man and a white woman was a seriously risky affair.”
Julia Mary Robinson was born on September 14, 1928, in Washington Heights, Manhattan, the daughter of Clara and George Robinson, each of Russian Jewish descent. She was raised in what she called an “interracial environment,” raised by liberal parents and went to highschool with each black and white children, she told Redbook magazine in 1958. She attended the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan (now Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts), where she excelled in dancing.
Around the age of 16, Ms. Robinson won a scholarship to the newly opened Katherine Dunham School of Dance in Manhattan and dropped out of highschool to pursue a profession in dance. (She later earned her GED). She was soon promoted to the position of student teacher; her students included Marlon Brando and Alvin Ailey, who was to turn out to be famous as a dancer, choreographer and director.
When a position opened up in Ms. Dunham’s renowned all-black dance company in the mid-Nineteen Forties, Ms. Robinson auditioned in Philadelphia and was hired as the company’s first white member.
“I never thought I would integrate my company,” she recalled in a 2015 interview with radio station WBAI, “but I knew I was a good dancer.”
Ms. Robinson, recognizable by her dark eyes, olive complexion and black hair, which she wore in a particular ponytail or braids that reached almost to her waist, traveled the world with the Dunham dancers, sometimes rooming with fellow dancer Eartha Kitt, before Ms. Kitt became a famous singer and an actress.
When the troupe was banned from hotels on the basis of race, a practice not unusual in the United States and abroad, Ms. Robinson insisted on staying where the other dancers were staying. She remained with the company for seven years.
In the early Nineteen Fifties, her parents moved to Los Angeles, and Ms. Robinson found her technique to Hollywood, helping to choreograph dance sequences in at least one film and later landing small roles in several others, including “Things,” a 1954 drama set in Italy and produced by Dino De Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti, and “Lust for Life”, a 1956 biographical film about Vincent Van Gogh starring Kirk Douglas and Anthony Quinn. Until then, she used Julie somewhat than Julia.
She met Mr. Belafonte on set “Carmen Jones”, a 1954 film musical during which he starred opposite Dorothy Dandridge, introduced to him by Mr. Brando, an excellent friend of Mr. Belafonte. She dated Mr. Brando on and off for several years after appearing with him in a touring production of “A Streetcar Named Desire.”
Mrs. Robinson and Mr. Belafonte became lovers, although Mr. Belafonte was still married to Margurite Belafonte, a black teacher and psychologist. He and Margurite separated shortly thereafter, although they publicly maintained the appearance of a comfortable marriage attributable to his rapidly rising profession.
Their marriage led to divorce in Las Vegas in February 1957. Eight days later, Mr. Belafonte, who was soon to show 30, and Mrs. Robinson, who was pregnant at 28, were married in Mexico, Mr. Belafonte wrote in his book with 2011 “My Song: A Memoir of Art, Race and Rebellion.”
They initially tried to maintain the marriage a secret to guard Mr. Belafonte’s two young daughters, Adrienne and Shari, along with his first wife, he wrote. But white gossip columnists and the black press were hot on their trail, forcing their publicist to announce the marriage.
Interracial marriage was rare in America then – half the states still prohibited it by law – and the indisputable fact that Mr. Belafonte divorced a black woman and married a white one so quickly carried with it an air of scandal. While the liberal entertainment circles during which Mr. Belafontes traveled largely accepted the relationship, Mr. Belafonte faced heavy criticism elsewhere, especially in the black press, where some columnists disparaged him as a wealthy, successful black man who was not comfortable along with his black wife.
Mr. Belafonte, already a widely known supporter of civil rights and integration, landed in the leading (*95*)-American magazine Ebony, writing an essay during which he argued that race had nothing to do with marriage. “I believe in integration and I work for it with all my heart and soul,” he wrote. “But I didn’t marry Julie Robinson to advance the cause of integration. I married her because I was in love with her, and she married me because she was in love with me.
The commotion eventually died down, and Ms. Belafonte put her career on hold and raised a family in Manhattan. But racial animosity continued to pull them along. When their first child, David, was born in the fall of 1957, Mrs. Belafonte received racist hate mail. “My first child,” she recalled in an interview for WBAI. “Do you imagine?”
For months, the Belafont family was unable to seek out a bigger apartment in Manhattan because landlords and real estate agents refused to rent to an interracial couple, and the situation made headlines. They eventually found an apartment on West End Avenue, where they lived for many years.
Their daughter, Gina, was born in 1961, and the family was often photographed arriving at airports while on tour, vacationing, or posing for profiles in newspapers and magazines, thus helping to destigmatize interracial marriage in the United States.
As Mr. Belafonte’s role in the civil rights movement grew, so did Mrs. Belafonte’s role. She planned fundraisers for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, also generally known as SNCC, which organized events of their homes and hotels for New York’s liberal wealthy class. She founded the “women’s chapter” of SNCC with actress Diahann Carroll, remaining with the organization at the same time as it began to lose favor with many white Americans during the Black Power era.
During the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights march, during which each Belafontes participated, it was Mrs. Belafonte who told the orange-jacketed private security forces that unusual residents of Selma deserved to steer it, before celebrities and dignitaries and were placed there.
During her 50-year marriage to Mr. Belafonte, she attended strategy meetings with Dr. King in the couple’s apartment, dined with presidents at the White House and with foreign leaders abroad, including Nelson Mandela and Fidel Castro. At a time when Cuba and the United States had no official channels of communication, she even relayed messages from the government in Havana to U.S. officials, in accordance with a declassified State Department memo.
Mrs. Belafonte took her interests away from her husband, in a single instance helping with Coretta Scott King in Washington in January 1968 to arrange the Women’s March against the Vietnam War. Before the event, she placed an ad in The New York Times asking women to “make women’s power political.”
She occasionally joined Mr. Belafonte’s tours as a dancer, and as their children grew older, she starred in several more movies, including “Buck and the Preacher” (1972), during which she appeared with Mr. Belafonte and Sidney Poitier as his wife Indian chieftain, winning critical acclaim. She learned the Native American dialect for this role.
Mr. and Mrs. Belafonte divorced in 2007, after which Mrs. Belafonte kept a low profile. In later years, she produced two documentaries: “Ritmo del Fuego” (2006) about (*95*) cultural heritage in Cuba and the Caribbean, and “Flags, Feathers and Lies” (2009) about the persistence of the Indian tradition of Mardi Gras in New Orleans.
After the death of Margurite Belafonte Mazique in 1998, Mrs. Belafonte assumed the role of matriarch of the family not just for her own children, but additionally for the children from Mr. Belafonte’s first marriage, Adrienne Belafonte Biesemeyer and Shari Belafonte. All of her children survive her, in addition to her three grandchildren.
“She was a real aggregator of types and created an atmosphere of diversity that was our home growing up,” David Belafonte said in an interview. “She opened her house to simply a bouquet of people – it was amazing. And Julie was the social glue that held this stuff together. There wasn’t an individual too big or too small that she would not wrap her arms around and make them feel like they were part of the crew.
